Free Trade and Globalization failing the working (80%?) class

martinthebandit

What the 'working class' is a fair wage for a fair days work.

What they don't want is government handouts.

Globalisation unfortunately offers wage stagnation and the answer from our (and other) governments has been handouts like working tax credits etc etc

bugslet

michaels wrote: »

I was wondering if a Polish cleaning contractor could bring people employed in Poland on Polish contracts over Monday AM and back Friday PM and pay them Polish salaries?

Any benefit would be wiped out by travelling and UK living costs. As per my post 20, lorry drivers can incur no costs whilst in the UK.

martinthebandit

Interesting article here
http://www.timworstall.com/2016/11/10/owen-jones-and-the-revitalisation-of-the-left/

bugslet

martinthebandit wrote: »

What the 'working class' is a fair wage for a fair days work.

What they don't want is government handouts.

Globalisation unfortunately offers wage stagnation and the answer from our (and other) governments has been handouts like working tax credits etc etc

Though the definition of a fair wage is difficult to pin down.

My Euro drivers earn around 40k a year, but they work 60 hours a week and are away from home a lot, not always in the best of surroundings and silly start and finish times. Is 40k good money for that? I don't know, but it's market rate.

GreatApe

martinthebandit wrote: »

What the 'working class' is a fair wage for a fair days work.

What they don't want is government handouts.

Globalisation unfortunately offers wage stagnation and the answer from our (and other) governments has been handouts like working tax credits etc etc

Are the working class actually worse off job or pay wise vs a generation ago?
I see no evidence for this. Just because a lot of people say it it does not make it true

There were indeed a lot of what were state sponsored non jobs that were destroyed by thatchers policies and post thatcher too. I used to work for British steel and it was not uncommon for people to have two jobs, their British steel job would be turning up and sleeping there and at the end of the shift they would go to their actual working jobs. Of course the pay and pension was good that you did not even need a proper working job. A lot of the more skilled trades on site would have people working under them whos only role was to carry their tools. Needless to say when the plant went from 30,000 workers towards 5,000 workers production still increased but there were probably 25,000 people and their families who were quite unhappy

If this is why people are angry and their view of the working class getting hammered or a raw deal then then its a foolish mindset and view to hold.

Other than examples like that, which were of course an anomaly and destined to die, what are the complaints of the working class.


For insistence does a working class plumber earn less now than a generation ago? Truly and honestly? I know the one man plumber, English man, I use does very well indeed and votes tory.

bugslet

Somewhere along the line, I remember it being reported that it was around 2% for the lower skilled, which I presume came from this

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2015/swp574.pdf

Not surprisingly, the results show that there are clear differences, in the impact of immigration on wages, across occupations. The static results suggest that the statistically significant negative effects of immigration on wages are concentrated among skilled production workers, and semi/unskilled service workers. In the latter cases, the coefficients
indicates that a 10 percentage point rise in the proportion of immigrants working in
semi/unskilled services
—
that is, in care homes, bars, shops, restaurants, cleaning, for
example
—
leads to a 1.88
percent reduction in pay.

However I also remember reading that the flaw in that is that the ONS accounted for long term jobs, and excluded those that were short term. For example, there is a building site behind me at the moment and around half of the people on there are foreign born, primarily East EU and they tend to work for a month and then move on, either a different job or go home for a bit. That sort of short-term position was excluded. I stand to be corrected on that though.

And of course, if I chip 1.88% from my pay, then it's a minor irritant, if you chip 1.88% from someone earning 15k a year, then it's more noticeable.

But really, doesn't common sense say that if there is more labour the value of that labour goes down and if there is a shortage, firms compete to attract employees by offering better wages?

GreatApe

bugslet wrote: »

Somewhere along the line, I remember it being reported that it was around 2% for the lower skilled, which I presume came from this

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2015/swp574.pdf

Not surprisingly, the results show that there are clear differences, in the impact of immigration on wages, across occupations. The static results suggest that the statistically significant negative effects of immigration on wages are concentrated among skilled production workers, and semi/unskilled service workers. In the latter cases, the coefficients
indicates that a 10 percentage point rise in the proportion of immigrants working in
semi/unskilled services
—
that is, in care homes, bars, shops, restaurants, cleaning, for
example
—
leads to a 1.88
percent reduction in pay.

However I also remember reading that the flaw in that is that the ONS accounted for long term jobs, and excluded those that were short term. For example, there is a building site behind me at the moment and around half of the people on there are foreign born, primarily East EU and they tend to work for a month and then move on, either a different job or go home for a bit. That sort of short-term position was excluded. I stand to be corrected on that though.

And of course, if I chip 1.88% from my pay, then it's a minor irritant, if you chip 1.88% from someone earning 15k a year, then it's more noticeable.

But really, doesn't common sense say that if there is more labour the value of that labour goes down and if there is a shortage, firms compete to attract employees by offering better wages?

We should not confuse and mix the two things, one is migration and the other is free trade.

My questioning is along the lines that 'if we introduced strict quotas or much higher tariffs for goods and services from foreign lands would this result in higher real incomes and higher quality of life for working class (by which I mean the 80% majority) and be better off' also a slight extension is that would there actually be good quality jobs from this re-shoring (ie would it be high pay and pleasant and safe to work in a high volume lower price shoe factory in the uk? instead of working in say a coffee shop

what would be the secondary impacts of us doing this like other countries setting quotas or much higher tarriffs on our exports?

overall I am just surprised by the recent mass of media articles and talk about the middle class (american English) working class (UK English) walking up and realising that free trade and globalization has been bad for them. people follow and believe what the media says and right now it seems very silly to me. the conclusion and even the premise seems wrong.

If the world was to enact quotas and much higher tariffs ie reverse free trade and globalization the impact would in my view be clearly negative. Replacing out exports of largely high tech education software film and finance etc with the likes of min wage jobs in shoe and garment manufacturing and the like seems absurd.

bugslet

GreatApe wrote: »

We should not confuse and mix the two things, one is migration and the other is free trade.

My questioning is along the lines that 'if we introduced strict quotas or much higher tariffs for goods and services from foreign lands would this result in higher real incomes and higher quality of life for working class (by which I mean the 80% majority) and be better off' also a slight extension is that would there actually be good quality jobs from this re-shoring (ie would it be high pay and pleasant and safe to work in a high volume lower price shoe factory in the uk? instead of working in say a coffee shop

.

Well that's a different question to the one I was answering:

GreatApe wrote: »

Are the working class actually worse off job or pay wise vs a generation ago?


For insistence does a working class plumber earn less now than a generation ago? Truly and honestly? I know the one man plumber, English man, I use does very well indeed and votes tory.

And I'm not an economist, you need michaels and antrobus etc for that one.

Conrad

Trump is correct to identify the fact American business has off-shored due to overly high taxation and overly burdensome regulations.


Business will come back if the balance is corrected.


In the end people will forgoe some employment 'rights' in return for the dignity of decent jobs.


Falling corporate tax rates could result not in less, but in more tax collected, as business comes back to America from Ireland et al.

whatmichaelsays

The value of manual labour as a commodity is simply falling - it's not worth what it once was because it can be done cheaper by other means. This isn't something that we are going to reverse.

The solution is, has been and always will be education and skills. If you as an individual aren't prepared to bring yourself up to speed with the technologically skilled workforce upon leaving education then you are, quite frankly screwed for life. Sadly people don't appear to want to master technology or grasp skills - we live in the 'I'm not good at...' nation.